This article idea has been beaten more than the proverbial dead horse and yet it still hasn't gotten through to people well enough yet so here I am to reiterate it all.
You need to start being more patient and kind and respectful to all service workers.
Whether it's retail, food services, cleaners, and housekeepers, or even straight-up customer service representatives, you need to treat us all with so much more gentleness and so much less vitriol than you bring to us in our daily lives.
We are all the only thing helping you live peacefully and comfortably and doing you favors just by doing our jobs, and yet you continue to cuss at, berate, sexually harass, under-tip, and ultimately make fun of us.
All under the guise of US working for YOU and "the customer is always right."
Newsflash, assholes, the customer is almost 100% of the time wrong and often you'll even demand us to do things we would get fired over and yell at us when we don't, but get this: we don't work for YOU, we work for whatever businesses or corporations have actually hired us and so their rules and regulations.
However foolish they may seem to you will always take precedence over your demands in honor of our own self-preservation of needing to put up with your bullshit in order to have a job and survive this cruel, capitalistic world.
Just because you make work in an office, making decisions with a team of people, or in a trade offering people things they are way too unqualified to even attempt, does not make you any cooler or more important than those of us that spend all day rearranging a clothing store, slaving away over a grill, cleaning up the disgusting states you leave your hotel rooms in, or help you handle an issue with your complaints about our companies' policies.
If anything, everything we have to put up with, and for almost never an adequate level of pay, makes us much more composed and disciplined and badass than you just by getting out of bed on the morning of our best days.
Not to mention the fact that so many of the people who put us through this on our workdays are the same ones who used to be in our positions and have somehow and somewhere along the way lost all of the sensibilities and compassion that this demands us learn.
Servers have it the worst, though, being paid what should be an illegal wage, just for tables of 30 people with a $1000 collective bill to leave less than a $10 tip or for many to not even tip at all.
Imagine being in their position, stressed beyond stress, doing everything possible to be pleasant and kind and entertain your small talk and creepy comments in the hopes of being able to go home and have a decent amount of cash to show for it, and instead having not even enough money at the end of a long day to break even on the cost of gas it takes to get to and from work.
Does that make you change your outlook? No? Well, then, go fuck yourself and stop eating out, honestly.
In short, stop being so insufferable and rude to everyone providing you with a service, and start treating everyone you encounter with as much love and respect as you can muster in your heart, and maybe you'll see yourself and your life filled with way more love than you ever thought possible. Put good in, get good out, and learn lessons along the way while you do.
Make this world a better place for us all, whether you're staring at us face to face as you try on your clothes, talking to us from halfway across the country in a call center, or you never even see us as we clean up the messes you leave behind when you check out of your room, we promise you we will give you equal treatment.
Even if one of these days that equal treatment means finally being allowed to make you feel like shit the same way you do us, and that should be a day you fear because I promise you, it isn't pretty.
